Comprehensive plug-in solutions have become essential to building customer loyalty
By Ziv Fass, Package.ai
Retail has fundamentally changed in recent years.
Even though in-store remains the strongest channel, online sales have been growing dramatically as a result of changing buyer behavior. Customers are now demanding a seamless real-world and online experience while shopping. And while omnichannel integration was once considered cutting edge, it is now a standard requirement expected by consumers.
For furniture and appliance retailers lagging behind in their digital transformation, this presents a lucrative opportunity to vastly improve customer satisfaction, build brand loyalty and, on the logistics side, optimize last-mile fulfillment.
Retailers selling big-ticket items, like BrandSource’s appliance and home furnishings members, have the most to gain from this transformation, as the typical customer shopping journey revolves around multiple touch points, both online and in-store. Providing customers with a fluid experience across physical and virtual stores, as does AVB Marketing’s extensive suite of technology tools, will improve customer satisfaction and help retailers maximize their revenue potential.
Tapping New Opportunities
While this digital transformation is energizing the overall shopping experience, it can also provide dealers full sight of all engagements they have with each individual customer. Instant access to this data can be used to forge deeper, more personalized relationships with customers and increase the potential for selling step-up products along with warranties, accessories and other high-margin add-ons.
However, retailers who implement separate, disconnected solutions will lack a fully integrated view of their customers’ journey. Internal departments will therefore be blind to each other’s actions when customer interactions are spread, disjointed, across multiple platforms.
Creating a Transparent Customer View
To create an integrated shopping experience for customers and merchants, siloed technology solutions will need to be replaced. Fortunately, achieving this is far more straightforward and cost-effective today thanks to artificial intelligence (AI) and automation.
When it comes to fulfillment, a single solution powered by conversational AI (i.e., chatbots), automated workflows and last-mile intelligence can deliver data about one’s customers and the status of their deliveries, and provide full visibility to all internal teams including sales, marketing, customer service and logistics. This will eliminate team silos and bring the ultimate transparency across all operations. Retailers can then use the flow of data to build, nurture and monetize deeper relationships with customers while dramatically reducing the hours spent on time-consuming manual tasks like delivery planning.
The Bottom Line
Using AI and automation to schedule and route delivery operations and ensure interactive engagements with shoppers will result in fewer failed deliveries and greater customer satisfaction. Once the consumer is wowed by their delivery experience, your sales team will have a happy new brand advocate with whom to further engage for additional upsell opportunities.
Ziv Fass is the CEO and co-founder of Package.ai, a BrandSource vendor partner whose customer engagement platform has aided furniture and appliance members. To learn more or book a demo, click here.
